Lost In Translation
While touted in some reviews as a Brief Encounter-like romance,
Lost in Translation is much more than that, including an examination of
aging — the confusion met upon reaching adulthood, the staleness of married life
and the aloofness of being past your prime.Special Feature: Sam PeckinpahIntroduction
Welcome to The High Hat’s Sam Peckinpah feature.Looks That Kill
What is unique to Peckinpah is the distribution of these points of identification.
Rather than focusing on the protagonists alone, the audience is encouraged also
to witness the action from the perspectives of horrified onlookers and victims
of crossfire.Ride the High Country
A film of abundant visual beauty, it’s also a highly literate one through whose
heart blows a chill valedictory breeze.Major DundeeMoby Dick tells us that pursuing your obsessions can destroy you; Peckinpah should
have been more wary.Algonquin Kids’ Table: The Wild Bunch
In which various participants gush and squibble over Peckinpah’s classic tale
of bad men in bad times.Straw Dogs
If Peckinpah truly wanted to make Death Wish, he’d have made Death
Wish. But
Straw Dogs isn’t a vengeance orgy at all unless you’re not quite paying attention.Junior Bonner
The Tao of Sam Peckinpah.Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid
The very title suggests a brace of opposing forces, an either/or that needs sorting
out, but it’s a riddle that Peckinpah, even had he been sober and left to his
own devices, had no intention of solving because he knew it couldn’t be done.Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia
There’s no heroic scale, little beauty, and the tenderest relationship is between
a man who’s dead and one who ought to be. All that’s left is a vein of black
humor a mile thick and a feeling of disgusted rage potent enough to blow you
across the room.The Osterman Weekend
Peckinpah was always a foe of received wisdom, and this is why: The
Osterman Weekend isn’t a terrible movie. It’s not even a bad movie. It’s certainly
not a great movie, but its status as the movie that literally and figuratively
buried him is entirely unjust.Pick a Peck of Poses
A Beginner’s Field Guide to the Peckinpah Actor.

The Bottom ShelfBY SCOTT VON DOVIAK

Crack open any bio of Sam Peckinpah and flip
to the Convoy section and inevitably you will be confronted
with tales of decline and dissolution to make your hair stand on
end. Coked to the gills, increasingly frail and paranoid, prone
to temper tantrums and incoherent rants, the once-great director
would have been hard-pressed to make something worthwhile out of
even the most promising material.

Convoy was,
to put it mildly, not the most promising material. The inspiration
(if you will) was a chart-topping hit from January 1976, recorded
by an advertising executive named Bill Fries under the pseudonym
C.W. McCall. Set to a driving, martial beat and steeped in CB lingo,
the song told the story of Rubber Duck, a defiant trucker who leads
a mighty fleet of trucks from Los Angeles to the Jersey shore,
ignoring speed limits, tolls and law enforcement along the way.
To the uninitiated, its lyrics are nearly indecipherable gibberish:

Was the dark of the moon on the sixth of June
In a Kenworth pullin’ logs
Cab-over Pete with a reefer on
And a Jimmy haulin’ hogs
We is headin’ for bear on I-one-oh
’Bout a mile outta Shaky Town
I says, “Pig Pen, this here’s the Rubber Duck.
“And I’m about to put the hammer down.”

It was as if Stanley Kubrick
had decided to follow Barry Lyndon with a lavish adaptation of “Disco
Duck.”

With America in the inexplicable grip of
CB fever, however, there were very few uninitiated in the mid-’70s.
Producer Robert Sherman
snapped up the movie rights and signed Peckinpah to direct a big
screen version of the novelty hit. For many of the director’s
fans, friends and family, this was not an occasion for rejoicing.
It was as if Stanley Kubrick had decided to follow Barry Lyndon with
a lavish adaptation of “Disco Duck.”

Peckinpah’s notion was to explore the
mystique of truck drivers as modern-day cowboys, which seems like
a decent idea until you realize that pretty much every trucker
movie, from the Jerry Reed/Peter Fonda opus High-Ballin’ to
the made-for-TV Flatbed Annie and Sweetiepie, relies on
the same conceit. Nevertheless, if there was ever a director equipped
to squeeze some juice out of this cliché, it would surely
be the man who made The Wild Bunch and Ride the High
Country.

As we’ve established, however, Convoy was
not the work of Peckinpah in his prime. The film’s troubled
production has been well-documented: a script under constant revision,
a shooting schedule shot to hell and a director given to holing
up in his trailer all day and raving psychotically about death
threats from Steve McQueen and the Executive Car Leasing Company.
The shoot was so chaotic, the movie’s big trailer moment
is actually a stunt gone awry (a car meant to crash through the
roof of a barn instead shreds the top of it and continues sailing
through the air).

Mounting delays (production shut down for a
month while star Kris Kristofferson went on tour) and an equally
troubled post-production period meant that Convoy was beaten
to theaters by a breezy, unpretentious redneck romp that went on
to become the second highest grossing film of 1977 (behind Star
Wars): Smokey and the Bandit. Peckinpah eventually abandoned
the project completely, leaving the editing in the hands of the
studio.

It all sounds pretty grim, but here’s
the part where I segue into my groundbreaking reappraisal of Convoy — a
daring corrective which persuasively argues that, despite its unpromising
origins and myriad birthing difficulties, the finished product
is in fact an unappreciated masterpiece, a brilliant fusion of
Peckinpah’s classic Western themes and contemporary working
class concerns, and the final crowning achievement of a cinematic
giant.

Even in his dissipated state,
it seems Peckinpah couldn’t settle for making a yee-haw smash-em-up.

Nah, just kidding. In fact, Convoy is generally deserving
of its reputation as the runt of the Peckinpah litter. It’s
not that the film isn’t ambitious; on the contrary, it demands
far too much of its flimsy source material. Even in his dissipated
state, it seems Peckinpah couldn’t settle for making a yee-haw
smash-em-up. He makes several ill-fated attempts at injecting
some social commentary into the legend of the Rubber Duck, and
when that doesn’t work, he shifts gears into a full-blown
Christ allegory.

On one level, the movie is a reasonably faithful
adaptation of the song, right down to the “eleven long-haired
friends of Jesus in a chartreuse microbus.” Its hero, truck
driver Martin Penwald (Kristofferson), goes by the CB handle Rubber
Duck. Along with fellow long-haulers Pig Pen (an aptly cast Burt
Young) and Spider Mike (Franklyn Ajaye), the Duck is lured into
a speed trap by a corrupt redneck sheriff known as Dirty Lyle (it
could only be Ernest Borgnine). After Lyle shakes the trio down
for cash bribes, they convene at a truck stop where the Duck becomes
reacquainted with Melissa (Ali MacGraw), a photographer who had
earlier aroused his interest by revealing her penchant for DWP
(Driving Without Panties).

Dirty Lyle drops by to fuck with the boys a
little more and a brawl breaks out. Rubber Duck and friends escape
(with Melissa hitching a ride with the Duck), forming a convoy
in hopes that safety in numbers will ensure they make it across
the state line. As the cavalcade of 18-wheelers rolls along, more
and more trucks join up in order to be part of the Duck’s
movement. The joke is, there really is no “movement” except
in the most literal sense of the term. When the press representative
for the governor of New Mexico pulls up alongside the Duck’s
truck and inquires as to the purpose of the convoy, our hero gives
the sort of terse, laconic cowboy response that seems freighted
with meaning while meaning nothing at all: “The purpose of
the convoy is to keep moving.”

And what is the purpose of Convoy? Peckinpah
can’t seem to decide. The early scenes are almost self-parodic — particularly
the truck stop brawl, where shattering ketchup bottles provide
the director’s trademark gushes of red fluid. Poorly edited
and scored to spirited fiddle music, there’s nothing to distinguish
this scene from the work of Hal Needham aside from the frequently
employed slow-motion, which in this context feels like a desperate
bid for attention. (“It’s still me behind the camera!
Bloody Sam!”)

Once the convoy is underway, we’re trapped
for long stretches with Kristofferson and MacGraw in the cab of
the Duckmobile, which is a lot like being stuck in an elevator
with your two dullest co-workers. Kristofferson is at least amiably
gruff, in his own distant way, but MacGraw seems to have beamed
in from the planet Stepford — she doesn’t give a single
line reading that resembles conversational human speech as we know
it. I don’t want to get too carried away making the case
for Smokey and the Bandit, but one need only compare the
Kristofferson/MacGraw scenes with the equivalent Burt Reynolds/Sally
Field interludes in the Bandit’s black Trans Am. While not
exactly a good ol’ boy Annie Hall, Smokey boasts
some crisp banter between its romantic leads and the occasional
snappy one-liner (such as Reynolds noting he has a great profile “especially
from the side”). The chemistry between the two is undeniable
and there’s a spontaneity to their exchanges that goes a
long way toward lending this car-chase picture a winning, offhand
charm. Kristofferson and MacGraw, on the other hand, look like
they’d be hard-pressed to strike a spark if they doused each
other in lighter fluid and skipped hand-in-hand through a Zippo
factory.

Peckinpah clearly has no more interest in these
characters than we do, so he turns his attention to making some
sort of social statement. Spider Mike, the black trucker, is subject
to Dirty Lyle’s taunts of “boy”; when he leaves
the convoy to tend to his pregnant wife, he is apprehended in Texas
and beaten by the authorities. Perhaps realizing that his exposé of
law enforcement officials of the American Southwest as brutal racists
is not the freshest or most fruitful angle to pursue, Peckinpah
shifts his attention back to the truckers, who have gathered at
a makeshift campsite to negotiate with Governor Jerry Haskins (Seymour
Cassel).

For a moment it seems that
Peckinpah is onto something, maybe a sort of Preston Sturges farce
about the absurdity of a disorganized protest with warring political
agendas.

The governor is an opportunistic buffoon hoping
to align himself with what he believes to be a massive grassroots
effort. Deprived of its ostensible purpose, however (the convoy
has after all stopped moving), the coalition splinters. It turns
out that many of the truckers do have causes — increased
federal regulation, the spiraling price of gasoline, the 55 mph
speed limit — and all of them are under the misapprehension
that the convoy is meant as a show of solidarity for their particular
grievances. For a moment it seems that Peckinpah is onto something,
maybe a sort of Preston Sturges farce about the absurdity of a
disorganized protest with warring political agendas.

Once again, however, the director veers off-course and plunges
down another dead-end. Having been notified of Spider Mike’s
plight, the Rubber Duck hightails it to Texas and uses his truck
as a battering ram to free his imprisoned comrade from “trucker’s
hell.” Leading the ragtag remains of his convoy, Rubber Duck
makes his way to the bridge into Mexico. Dirty Lyle and the National
Guard are waiting for him with a tank, everything goes kablooie
and the Duck goes into the drink.

It is more or less at this point that we realize
we’re watching the story of Jesus re-imagined as a metal-twisting,
glass-shattering, pedal-to-the-metal action spectacular. The long-haired,
bearded Rubber Duck is our double-clutching messiah, leading his
followers (including those apostles in the microbus) to salvation.
(“They’re all following you,” MacGraw monotones. “No
they ain’t,” Kristofferson gravels. “I’m
just in front.”) He becomes a martyr, as he must, but on
the third day he rises again. The film ends with the resurrected
Duck spirited away by his flock to the sunnier shores beyond.

I’m not suggesting that Peckinpah took
any of this allegorical hoo-hah seriously. More likely, he simply
threw in the towel when it came to devising any kind of satisfying
conclusion to what is, after all, a shapeless mess that never settles
on a consistent tone or coherent storyline. In the end, Convoy offers only a handful of striking images — the opening shots
of a string of trucks making their way through dunes of white sand
along a narrow ribbon of highway, then later, those same trucks
skidding out of control in the desert and kicking up huge, gorgeous
billows of dust. Any metaphorical link between those images and
their creator is, of course, strictly coincidental.